Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a weekly columnist and senior writer for The American Prospect. He also writes for the Plum Line blog at The Washington Post and The Week and is the author of Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.

Recent Articles

In the 1971 Woody Allen film Bananas , after a revolutionary leader succeeds in overthrowing the government of a small Latin American country, he begins issuing bizarre edicts . He declares the country’s official language to now be Swedish, and announces that “all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside, so we can check.” The new president’s aides, realizing that he has gone off the deep end, immediately remove him from power. Our current situation would resemble that kind of absurdist comedy were it not for the fact that the stakes are so high and the consequences of Donald Trump’s presidency so grave. But the real difference between America today and Bananas lie not in the president’s behavior but in the apparatus of support that surrounds him. One can make a convincing argument that President Trump has become so erratic and his public comments so disturbing that he has shown...

Oliver Contreras/SIPA USA/AP Images Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders with President Donald Trump in the East Room, June 13, 2019. After Donald Trump became his party’s nominee for president in 2016, a great many Republicans in Washington said publicly and privately that they would never work in his administration if he were to win. For some it was because they doubted his commitment to conservative ideology, but for most it was about Trump as a person: He was erratic, unqualified, and most of all an utterly corrupt and immoral person who sullies everything he touches. They had principles, and reputations to defend. He might be in office for four or eight years, but they would be around after that time was over. Working for Trump could only end in shame and ignominy. If things went poorly, it might even be career suicide. Just imagine what kind of accounting there could be at the end of what was certain to be a disastrous presidency! No one who had put...

Chris Carlson/AP Images Supporters of Congressman Gil Cisneros, a Hispanic Democrat elected to represent the 39th District in Orange County, California, cheer at a rally at the Cal State Fullerton campus. Last week, The Los Angeles Times reported that formerly deep-red Orange County now has more registered Democrats than Republicans. In 1997, The American Prospect ’s Paul Starr wrote an article titled “ An Emerging Democratic Majority ,” in which he argued that demographic and voting trends suggested the possibility that Democrats could take firm control of American politics for years or even decades to come. His title was a play on The Emerging Republican Majority , a 1969 book by former Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips that laid out the “Southern Strategy” that Republicans had used with such success. As Starr described Phillips’s thesis, “The Democratic Party's embrace of black interests had opened the South to the Republicans, while rapid...

Will Hurd apparently had enough. The Texas congressman announced last week that he will not run for re-election, one of a string of Republicans to do so in recent days. Perhaps it was that being in the congressional minority is no fun, or perhaps Hurd felt isolated as a relative moderate (“Especially for some of these members who buck the party on occasion, they are finding it a less hospitable place to be,” said former Representative Tom Davis). Or perhaps it was the fact that as the lone African American Republican in the House, Hurd could no longer stand being asked to defend Donald Trump. Whatever the reason, Hurd’s departure was just the most vivid recent illustration of the fact that the Republican Party, already extraordinarily white and male, is getting even more so. There are only 13 women among the 197 Republicans in the House of Representatives, making their caucus an incredible 93 percent male. Two of those women have already announced that they won...

“This is not who we are.” How many times have you heard that said since Donald Trump became president? Candidates say it . Ex-candidates say it . Pundits say it . It’s as much a desperate plea as it is an assertion. This is not who we are...is it? The question of who, exactly, we are as a country is something we grapple with in just about every presidential election, though in some elections more than others. In 2008, Democrats took Barack Obama’s victory as an affirmation that America was the kind of country they wanted it to be: multiethnic and multiracial, open and inclusive, forward-looking and forward-thinking. But right away, Republicans said, “No. That is not who we are.” They expressed their loathing for Obama in a hundred ways, but at its center was the belief that he was not Us—not born here, not a Christian like he claimed, with a worldview “so outside our comprehension,” in Newt Gingrich’s words , that he could...